Oh, hai!

Pappy, in his everlasting quest to make life more interesting, has added a cohort to his blog. Me. I am his slightly more sarcastic, slightly less media savvy (read: I watch less television) co-conspirator. Though I'm not sure that's a good word to use, considering all the implications in this post-9-11, post-post modernist world we live in. But I digress.

Who am I? Good question. I am a recent graduate of the University of Washington in International Studies. I am a walking example of the effects of the economic recession on graduating college students. In short, I am wasting my mental acuity working a dead end retail job. But let's not focus on the negative here. Let's instead focus on what I'm interested in, since I have no specialties or experience to speak of. I wrote a whole lot of papers on Israel while I was in college, mostly relating to human rights. Let's summarize them all by saying it's a depressing specialty in a depressing field. Since then, I have found my focus shifting from Israel (and their human rights record) to other countries in the Middle East. Of most interest to me are what could be politely termed as the potential failed states, Yemen, Lebanon, Iran, and most recently Tunisia and Egypt.

When I say failed states, I do not mean Weber's legitimate use of force. Nor do I necessarily mean Foreign Policy's multitudinal spectrums of failure, which use mathematical equations to rank states along a spectrum of nastiness. I don't do math. Essentially what I mean by "failing states," which I understand is a loaded and controversial term, are states I see as teetering on the brink of chaos. What does chaos mean? Depends on the country. In Yemen, it means that Saudi Arabia violates your northern border in order to address revolutionary overspill. In Lebanon it means a fragile democracy where the head of government has to depend on a party which is his ideological opposite to stay in power. Or in the case of Lebanon, it means the head of government is ousted as a result of a report that has yet to be released on the subject of the previous head of government's death at the hands of a member of the more recent head of government's coalition [Ed.'s Note: Previous head of state was also his dad (/spins bowtie)]. That's a can of worms, isn't it? In Iran, it's the total subjegation of the rule of law to the will of the ruling whatever-they-are. Let's call them posse, just because I kind of assume Ahmadinejad and Khomeini wouldn't like being called a posse. And I find that entertaining, in a Muhammed-on-South-Park-in-a-Bear-Suit kind of way.

And I won't insult the readers intelligence by explaining why Tunisia and Egypt are potentially failed states. That seems intiutive at this point.

So to summarize: I'm an international affairs nerd. I geek out when people bring up the Cold War, ethnic minorities along the Af-Pak border (which I will henceforth refer to as Pak-Af, just because I read somewhere it pisses off the ISI, and one of my goals in life is to piss off foreign intelligence services), and all those -cracies (democracy, theocracy, autocracy, etc). Expect to hear more from me, and Pappy, since I've become his Nag In Chief.

Signing off for now.